The Millennium Peak in Club Convergence: A New Look at Distributional Changes in The Wealth of Nations

This paper proposes an easy‐to‐use nonparametric indicator for club convergence, or convergence within clusters of countries: it measures whether the modes of the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita distribution become more pronounced over time. Relying on changes in the critical bandwidth for unimodality, the indicator is a dynamic extension of concepts from often‐used multimodality tests. Its evolution suggests the new empirical result of a ‘millennium peak’ in club convergence in the worldwide GDP per capita distribution. The club convergence movements of the 1980s and 1990s, when groups of poor and rich countries converged to two separate points, was followed by a de‐clubbing movement after the turn of the millennium. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Disability and self-employment: evidence for the UK

This article examines the self-employment decision for disabled and nondisabled workers in the UK. Using Labour Force Survey (LFS) data, it is found that self-employment may provide an important means by which those with work-limiting disabilities can accommodate their impairment.     

Has The Accuracy of Macroeconomic Forecasts for Germany Improved?

This study asks whether the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts for Germany has improved over time. We examine one‐year‐ahead forecasts of rates of real GDP growth and inflation for the years 1967–2010, by three major German forecasters and the OECD. We find that overall error levels are high but not much different from those of the U.S. and U.K. In the 1980s and 1990s accuracy improved somewhat, but has now returned to its 1970s level, indicating that it reflects the variance of growth and inflation. Benchmark comparisons with these predictions with ex post forecasts of a macroeconometric model indicate that accuracy can be improved, but it will be difficult to achieve.     

Crowding Out Informal Care? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Germany*

This article evaluates the effects of a consumer‐directed home care programme (Personal Budgets) compared with the standard home care programmes of the German long‐term care insurance (LTCI). The evaluation makes use of a random assignment into a treatment group receiving personal budgets and a control group receiving either in‐kind benefits (agency care) or cash payments. Compared with agency care, personal budgets extend the support by independent providers, but leave health outcomes unchanged. Compared with cash payments, personal budgets tend to improve health outcomes, but double LTCI spending due to a strong crowding out of informal care by formal care.     

Within-person variation in affective commitment to teams: Where it comes from and why it matters

Teamwork is crucial to organizational success and commitment to teams is an important predictor of team-related behaviors. However, theorists and researchers have typically assumed that commitment levels are generally stable within-persons, increasing or decreasing as a result of substantial organizational changes. This position is at odds with the evidence of systematic and regular intraindividual fluctuations in personal attributes and workplace behaviors. We draw upon affective events theory to present a model explaining how certain events and dispositions produce vacillations in affective reactions which, in turn, are likely to create within-person variation in affective commitment to teams (WPVC_teams). We further propose that WPVC_teams enhances prediction and explanation of intraindividual fluctuations in work behavior and, interindividually, moderates the relationship between level of commitment and behavior.     

Financial comparisons of under‐vine management systems in four South Australian vineyard districts*

Conventional viticultural practice in Australia and elsewhere involves removal of under‐vine vegetation using herbicides or cultivation. Concerns over the long‐term effects of herbicides on soil health, evolution of resistant weeds and possible impacts on human health motivate the search for alternative weed management options. Industry‐supported trials on commercial vineyards in four South Australian regions investigated standard practices of straw mulch and bare earth created with herbicides, compared to under‐vine cover crops, focusing on soil health attributes (soil carbon, soil microbiological processes, etc.) and grape yields in 2016 and 2017. Measured yields with the Control (herbicide) treatment were combined with published district grape prices and yields over the 12‐year (2006–2017) period, defining multivariate distributions of gross revenues ($/ha). Assuming all treatments produce grapes of equal quality and price as the Control, our results showed median per‐hectare gross margins greater than the Control in the Barossa district, lower than Control in Riverland, and mixed results in Langhorne Creek and Eden Valley. Multi‐year risk profiles, based on decadal whole‐farm (50 ha) cash flows for each treatment, were calculated using Monte Carlo analysis, based on historical yield and price distributions. These risk profiles showed the under‐vine treatments may result in major differences in long‐term vineyard financial viability.     

The paths from insider to outsider: A review of employee exit transitions

Employees' roles as organizational members often do not end immediately after they have made the decision to leave or it has been made for them. Instead, this decision serves as a turning point initiating an exit transition process. The purpose of this article is to consolidate prior scholarship in order to gain an understanding of the state of the science, as it pertains to exit transitions. Our literature review yielded almost 200 articles that have directly or indirectly studied the exit transition process. In organizing the insights from these studies, four categories of exit transition scholarship emerged—exit transitions in the context of voluntary turnover, involuntary turnover, temporary transitions, and top management exits. Moreover, our review indicated that exit transitions are shaped by three critical forces—the permanence of the transition, the magnitude of the identity change associated with the exit, and the organizational impact of the exit. We review research on each of the four categories and show how each type of transition is shaped by these forces. Finally, we turn our focus to the future of work and discuss how changes in the way that work is structured may alter the study of employee exit transitions in the future.